Windows – Cannot kill process in Windows 7

processwindowswindows 7

I'm running Windows 7 x64. Once in a while I have a process that freezes and that cannot be killed. I've tries the following:

  1. Process Explorer
  2. pskill
  3. taskkill /F /T

Nothing worked. Tools report that the process was killed successfully, but it just stays there.

How do I kill it?

UPDATE

I know now that it always happen when some application tries to connect to a SQL Server and the SQL Server is not started. The application always freezes.

UPDATE

As DougN assumed the number of handles of the frozen process was indeed 1. In the process explorer it showed this

Desktop \Default

Not sure what this is. I couldn't close this handle from Process Explorer. Then I searched for other processes that contained references to the frozen process. Found two handles in csrss.exe. Closed them. Then I tried to close the frozen process again, but it didn't work.

UPDATE
I have tried the application called Advanced Process Termination v4.2. Which has 12+2+2 methods to kill stubborn processes. I've tried all the 16 methods and non of them worked. I believe that this is a Windows 7 bug.

UPDATE
Seems that here's the discussion of this problem:

Best Answer

Look in Task Manager and add a column for Handles. If it has a very low number of handles (less than 10? Often 1) the process is dead and not running, but can't unload because something has a handle to it.

When it's happened to me, I had to find the process that launched it, and close the parent. Perhaps you could use Procexplorer and find the handle and manually release it though?

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